Product manufacturers and retailers frequently announce and release upcoming products during limited release launch events. For popular and highly anticipated products, these limited release launch events draw long customer lines and cause frustration for potential customers who are unable to purchase the released product on launch day due to insufficient supply and retail locations running out of inventory. Moreover, as retailers allow reservations for products to be made online and over the Internet, these retailers face technical hurdles unique to the online electronic reservation process. For example, for limited release product launches, online “spam bots” are computer programs that automatically generate electronic transmissions designed to mimic a real person. In the context of limited release and highly popular product launches, spam bots mimic online reservation requests, creating fraudulent reservations and reducing the number of available reservations for potential customers. There is a need for better online authentication measures during the online reservation process to combat the rise in spam bots and ensure that the ensuing reservation request is from a real person.
Further, for large and popular retailers, millions of potential customers may be geographically dispersed. Occasionally, a retailer may have a product launch event limited to flagship store. With geographically limited product launches, there is a further need for retailers to be able to refine and control the online reservation process. Thus, another technical hurdle unique to the electronic reservation process used by retailers, particularly for retailers that have product launches limited to a flagship store, is in controlling and limiting the reservation requests so that only potential customers near the vicinity of the launch event will be able to complete the reservation.
In addition, current processes for launching new products and making said products available to customers who have reserved the products rely on traditional methods of manufacturing and distribution. For example, retailers and manufacturers produce a limited set of inventory via centralized manufacturing methods and distribute the limited inventory to the one or more retail locations that will be hosting the product launches. Retailers and manufacturers incur shipping and other overhead costs with the current system.